Working name for most of his sf of UK author John Burke (1922-2011), who wrote sf and fantasy under his own name (much of his short sf is so signed) as well as J F Burke and Robert Miall, and who used various other pseudonyms for non-fantastic work. He was active in Fandom in the 1930s (see TheFuturian), only beginning to publish sf proper with "Chessboard" for New Worlds in January 1953. Prior to this he had made an early sale to Tales of Wonder with "Before the Flood", though the magazine ceased in 1942 before this could be published; his actual professional debut was the horror tale "The Lost Child" (1952 Magpie). Burke's first novel, Swift Summer (1949) as by J F Burke is a marginal fantasy of some slight interest, as is The Outward Walls (1951). His sf novels, which tend to the routine, do deal competently enough with a variety of themes, from Parallel Worlds in The Echoing Worlds (1954) to Evolution in Twilight of Reason (1954), though without excessive energy; Deep Freeze (1955) faces an all-female world with the return of the male (see Women in SF); the protagonist of Pursuit through Time: A Modern Novel of Science and Imagination (1956) attempts to prevent a worldwide dictatorship through Time Travel into the past, where he hopes to prevent the tyrant's birth. Burke also wrote Ties as by Robert Miall, notably of Moon Zero Two (1969) and the 1970s television series UFO [see Checklist below]. In later years, almost always as John Burke, he edited Horror anthologies, novelized film and television productions, and continued to write supernatural fiction, much of which was assembled in We've Been Waiting For You and Other Tales of Unease (coll 2002). [JC/DRL]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →